Dollar Tree -- some of the great deals there

The old maxim, "you get what you pay for" is really true for some things. For instance, Kool-Aid is a pretty cheap beverage. Whereas real fruit juice can be 5, 6, 7 times the cost of the colored water peddled to young families with the thirst of oodles of neighborhood kids to quench. But real fruit juice contains many of the nutrients of the fruit it is extracted from. So, on the one hand, colored water with a bit of ascorbic acid added for the cheapo price of a quarter a packet, or, juice from real fruit, with the nutrients, anti-oxidants and phyto-chemicals from that fruit for a couple of dollars per family-size bottle.

That ramshackle house with broken windows, leaky roof and ancient bathroom fixtures may be priced to move, move, move. But in real estate, they say it's all about location, location, location, and I'd add, maybe also a bit about condition. They don't call them tear-downs for nothing. Meanwhile, a clean, well-kept, modest house, priced moderately higher than the falling apart shack, if chosen, would give you peaceful nights of sleep.

So, you sometimes do get what you pay for. If you're willing to pay more, you may very well get a better outcome on your purchase. But this isn't always the case. I've bought nice clothing for dirt cheap, and had it hold up very well for years, and I've spent what, to me, seemed like a small fortune on a pair of jeans that began to pop rivets on the second wearing (drat on that one, as they were cute, flattering, and bought with a Christmas present gift certificate).

And so it is with shopping for groceries and other household items. Sometimes it's just the luck of finding a good sale that brings you value beyond what you paid, like with loss-leaders at the grocery store. Other times, it's a matter of knowing where to buy certain items. You all know that one of my grocery shopping haunts is Dollar Tree. Some of their items fall into the "get what you pay for" category, with cheap, flimsy craftsmanship. But some items are a real deal, and I use Dollar Tree for my primary source of those items.

I thought that today might be a good day to exchange thoughts about what we've bought from Dollar Tree and found to be great deals. I'll start with my list.

• macaroni and spaghetti pasta (Pegasa brand), 24 oz bags, this works out to 66 cents/lb. For me that's a good price on white flour pasta.
• toothbrushes, 4-pack, soft, they wear out in about a month, but that's when I feel like I want a new/fresh one anyway.
• toothpaste -- sometimes this is a good deal, $1 for a tube of Aim, if I'm out. However, I find larger tubes of Colgate, on sale at Fred Meyer about 2 times per year, and for less (usually 89 cents/tube with coupon, but always a limit)
• bar soap, 3-pack of Dial basics -- again, sometimes I do find it on sale at Fred Meyer, but FM regular price is $1.50 for that same 3-pack.
• automatic dishwashing detergent, Sun brand, a powder -- this is one of my favorite items from Dollar Tree, because in my dishwasher, it works as well as Cascade did for me. (DT liquid automatic dishwashing detergent is horrible, though.) I'm not the only one who buys the Sun brand of auto-dish detergent, apparently, as they sell out frequently. So when I'm at Dollar Tree, if they have any in stock, I buy several boxes at a time.
• liquid dish hand-washing detergent, lemon-scented, LA's Totally Awesome brand, 50 oz -- it's not super great at really greasy pans, but good enough for most hand-washing, and doesn't strip the oils from my hands, AND 50 ounces for $1, that's pretty cheap. For some reason, the other scents have not been nearly as good at cleaning as the lemon scent, for us. Go figure.
• at back to school time, the student planner notebooks. Target sells student planners for about $4-$5 each. The DT ones may not be as "cute" but are a lot cheaper, at a dollar a pop. But the rest of the back-to-school stuff is overpriced at DT.
• pantyhose, my daughter is trying out a pair this week. I'll get her opinion -- oops, she said they tore/got a run on the first day of wearing them
• plastic hangers, when they have a bonus pack of 8 hangers, I buy them. I use plastic hangers not just in closets, but we use about a dozen for hanging dry laundry.
• moisture absorbing crystals (the kind to remove humidity from the air), this is another favorite Dollar Tree item of mine. DampRid is the familiar name brand. Dollar Tree carries the "home Store" brand. I buy these and use in bathrooms, bedrooms and closets. They do help with the mold/mildew from dampness, here.
• bathroom tile/grout cleaner. It has bleach in it. I use it on the kitchen sink, once per month (scrub with baking soda the rest of the month), and I use it on tile/grout for combo bath/shower, and bathroom sinks/toilets, weekly. I do water it down a little, so it's not so strong smelling. Once watered down, it's better for "maintenance" spraying (every few days, to keep mold at bay), rather than deep cleaning. But I prefer using it this way. Before buying the Dollar Tree tile/grout cleaner, I bought Target's Up and Up brand of the same thing for about $3 per same size bottle as Dollar Tree's cleaner.
• kitchen sponges, these are the kind with the green scrubbing side. They come 6 to a package. I cut each of mine in half, giving me 12 scrubbing sponges for $1. Good deal.
• those little felt things that you put under chair legs to help chairs slide on hard floors silently, and w/o scratching a wood floor, a package of 8 for $1, compared to buying a similar item at Target for $4 or $5.
• epsom salt, when they have plain epsom salt, I buy those bags, several at a time (they keep for years). The scented epsom salts are not as good a value, as the bags are much, much smaller than the plain, and the scents are not essential oils (which I prefer for scenting bath products).
• baking soda (I bought a case of baking soda last spring, for 59 cents per box). You can do better at a drug store, like Walgreen's, when they have an in-ad coupon, often at 50 cents/box. But I haven't seen that coupon in a year or two.
• poster board for school projects 50 cents a sheet. This is a great price. We had to buy poster board one year at a local drug store, and spent $1.50 per sheet!
• greeting cards, yet another huge favorite Dollar Tree item of mine. Most of DT greeting cards are 50 cents each. Some are $1, so you have to check for the 50-cent brand. But for 50 cents, I can send my non-frugal (and so would not appreciate my handmade cards) nieces and nephews a "real" birthday card with a couple of bills in it, and have the card not eat up my gift budget for them. In addition to individual greeting cards, you can buy packages of correspondence note cards. My daughter bought 10-packs of cute cards to send to her Sunday school class, announcing the beginning of the fall quarter. That was 10 cents per card!
• votive candles, 4-pack for $1. The best time/place to buy votives is after Christmas, at local drug stores, often for 10 to 15 cents each. But if I don't buy enough for summer candles or next holiday season, I can always pick up a 4-pack at Dollar Tree.
• crackers, savory types, as well as graham crackers and animal crackers, pretzels and rice cakes. I don't buy crackers, pretzels, rice cakes all that often. Those are special treat items for us. But when I do, I always buy them at Dollar Tree. Ritz-type crackers go on sale near the holidays for just under $2 a box at a regular grocery store. I buy the same sort of cracker, in about the same size package, for $1 at Dollar Tree. More elegant-looking crackers (for swankier shindigs), the large, circular crackers (Monet-brand at Dollar Tree), that you might use for making appetizers are also sold at Dollar Tree. When I'm babysitting, I bring little baggies of animal crackers, which I get at Dollar Tree, then portion out into small baggies. Rice cakes are over-priced (for what you get) in regular grocery stores. But at Dollar Tree, they're worth the splurge to me. 
• Dove chocolate bars, individual bars, 79 cents each. Dove chocolate bars are more expensive than the rest of the candy bars in grocery stores, usually 99 cents to $1.19 in a traditional grocery store, but only 79 cents at Dollar Tree.
• paper coffee filters -- I use these, as is, in the large coffee maker, made smaller as an individual cup coffee filter (for an old 1 cup at a time coffee maker, the washable filter is torn, and can't be replaced any longer), and sewn into tea bags for loose leaf tea.
• soy milk, comes in a 1-quart, shelf stable carton. I rarely see soy milk on sale below a dollar any more, so Dollar Tree's price is the best around. The brand is West Soy, a regular supermarket brand.
• kitchen washcloths. I actually buy these in 2-packs in the bath towel section. I buy the white ones, and use for wiping down counters in the kitchen. This is Dollar Tree, so you can imagine that these are not luxury, plush washcloths, but very lightweight, all-cotton cloths that are perfect for kitchen use. (I'd be disappointed in them if I was using them in the bath, though, way too thin.) 2/$1 is a pretty decent price for kitchen washcloths. And when they start to look dingy, I spread them out in the kitchen sink and spray the tile/grout cleaner on them, and allow to sit for a couple of hours. The sink and the cloths come out clean and white, once again.

Perhaps the worst deal at Dollar Tree is found in the home improvement/automotive section. It's the duct tape. You get hardly any tape on the roll, 10 yards. It's mostly cardboard roll. Whereas, at Home Depot, you can buy 55 yards of general purpose duct tape for $3.98. That's 5 & 1/2 times the duct tape for only 4 times the price, or like getting 15 yards of duct tape for free by buying it at Home Depot.

So, tell me, what are your favorite Dollar Tree items?

Frugal snacks from my kitchen

The snack industry is relatively young, if you think about it. 150 years ago, if you wanted a snack, you had your choice of bread (and maybe butter), an apple (if you had an apple tree), maybe a homemade cookie or homemade doughnut, or maybe a glass of milk. I imagine that most of the time, if you declared that you wanted a snack, you'd be told that you'd spoil your appetite for the next meal if you ate anything.

And yet, today, snack foods take up a large chunk of the grocery aisles, and the consumers' dollars. In my own quest to keep my grocery spending in check, I make most of our snacks. I don't make chips or crackers (at least not very often), as those are so time-consuming to make. So I try to find other snacky foods that satisfy the same type of cravings.

Nuts make very healthy snack material. but they're expensive. Seeds, however, have many of the same nutrients and snack appeal, but at a much reduced cost. I've told you that I buy raw sunflower seeds, then pan-roast them at home, myself. I spend $1.34/lb for sunflower seeds, putting them at the high-end of what I find acceptable in expense for snack foods (but still okay with me, as they are so nutritious).

These aren't pumpkin seeds. (But home-roasted pumpkin seeds from your Jack-o-lantern are also a super cheap snack food.) These are the seeds from winter squash, 2 small Delicata squash and 1 acorn squash.

I save the uncleaned seeds in the refrigerator, in a small bowl of water, up to 1 week, until I have enough seeds to make it worth my time to clean them and roast them. It took me a week to cook 3 squash and accumulate enough seeds to roast squash seeds this week.

To clean and roast, I dump them into a colander in the sink, and under running water I separate the pulp from the seeds. When clean, I toss briefly with oil, right in the colander. Then spread on a baking sheet and roast in a 350 degree oven, for about 10 minutes, remove from oven and stir, and roast for 5-minute increments, stirring between, until they are just golden. Sprinkle with salt and they make a yummy and super healthy snack (high in minerals, notably magnesium and zinc). If you have previously been throwing out the seeds from winter squash, then these would be a basically-free snack.

For that salty, cracker or chip-like crispy/crunchy snack, I turn to garlic toast. As I'm cleaning out my freezer, I went looking for bread products in there.

I found 1 hamburger bun, which had been frozen, thawed and frozen again, a potato roll from the sandwich lunch we had a couple of weeks ago, and this half-slice of homemade French bread. In a small dish, I mixed some butter, garlic powder and salt. then spread this on the halves of rolls/buns and bread. Broiled for a couple of minutes, until toasty.

And since I sometimes want a sweet snack, I made muffins, using up the last of the baked acorn squash from lunch and breakfast this week. Quick breads also make good snack material, and are easy to make.

I spent about 1 hour making snacks the other day, and prepared about 2 days of snacking stuff for my family (we're big snackers, here, and there are 5 of us). What I made not only was less expensive than commercial snack foods, but much healthier than anything I could buy in a store.

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers with an average cost of $3.00 to $3.50 to feed 5 of us

Inside-Out Chicken Cordon Bleu

Tuesday
BBQ pork sliders on leftover dinner rolls
frozen peas
*leftover gingered pear crisp

Wednesday
pork and beans (using leftover BBQ pork in the baked beans)
roasted squash (one of the squash from "decorating" a side table in family room for Sunday's gathering)
cornbread
*tomato wedges with leftover bacon ranch dressing (from last Sunday's gathering)

Thursday
slider burgers (using leftover sandwich buns from last weekend, and dividing the last 2 hamburger patties, to make 5 sliders)
*with homegrown lettuce, onion  and tomato
leftover pork and beans
*applesauce (from freezer)

Friday
Mexi black bean soup (with green pepper, frozen corn, canned tomatoes, leftover cooked rice, topped with corn tortilla strips made from the very last 2 corn tortillas bought in June)
leftover sandwich buns turned into garlic toast
*blackberry-rhubarb crisp (I'm cutting the last of the rhubarb this week. This crisp was made from fresh garden rhubarb and wild blackberries picked in August and frozen. I used the same basic crisp topping as was in Wednesday's post for the recipe -- Gingered Pear Crisp, reducing the ginger in the topping to 1/4 teaspoon. That topping is pretty yummy!)

Saturday
leftover Mexi black bean soup
French bread
*cole slaw with cabbage from garden
*leftover blackberry-rhubarb crisp

Sunday
black beans and rice, green pepper and canned tomatoes
*garden beans and last of summer squash sauteed in bacon fat
*fresh pear slices
*cole slaw with cabbage from garden
sugar cookies (from last weekend's gathering)

Monday
Inside-Out Chicken Cordon Bleu -- using an oven-roasted chicken leg quarter (1 leg quarter split between the 5 of us). Chicken meat wrapped in ham and Swiss cheese (ham and cheese leftover from gathering at our house, wrapped around serving portions of chopped, seasoned roasted chicken). Spooned some chicken stock over all, and covered with foil, heated in oven for 15 minutes.
*leftover rice, cooked with chicken fat, rosemary and garlic
*sauteed kale, mustard greens and cabbage
*tomato and cucumber salad
*rhubarb-blackberry cobbler

Tuesday
*ham-bean-veggie soup (I had the ham bone from September's baked ham in the freezer. I made stock with it, picked the last of the meat off the bone, and then added cooked beans, garden carrots, potatoes, and Swiss chard, along with seasonings)
*curried pea and peanut cole slaw (using Lisa's recipe -- thanks Lisa!)
*leftover rhubarb-blackberry cobbler

Wednesday
*turkey and dumplings with garden beet greens, Swiss chard, onion, potatoes and carrots (turkey in stock in freezer), plus frozen peas and barley, topped with biscuit dough
*marinated beet salad over garden greens
*Asian pear slices
*apple pie


*indicates part or all of this menu item came from the garden or orchard

This is frustrating me to no end -- I can't seem to clear space from the freezers. Every day, I take a couple of things out of the freezer, but then later in the day, I add more. It has gotten so bad that I can't find things in there. I'm sure I have one more loaf of bread in the freezers, but after several searches yesterday, I came up with nothing. I am going to really work at using up some of the freezer contents. I know, too much food should not be a problem. Rant over.

I was thrilled on Tuesday to realize that I had all of the ingredients (cabbage from garden, frozen peas, canned peanuts and dressing ingredients) to make Lisa's Curried Pea and Peanut slaw (from March of 2014 -- recipe here). I had chives from the garden to add to Tuesday's version. It was delicious. Whenever I taste this, I wonder to myself why I would ever want to buy a deli salad at the grocery store.

In estimating costs per meal, I come up with about half of our food costs cover dinner for all of us, and the other half is split between breakfast and lunch. We are currently averaging about $6 per day for 5 adults. So our Cheap & Cheerfuls are costing about $3 or just a bit more, for all 5 of us. When our oldest was a baby, we spent about $30 per week on groceries (and had no garden). We now spend about $50 per week, are feeding 5 instead of 3, and have a garden and orchard. If we didn't have the garden or fruit growing on our property, I imagine that I would be spending about $100 per week. Growing our own produce has a big impact on our grocery bill.

The other huge money saver is that we buy the cheapest cuts of meat that our family will actually eat. I buy whole turkeys, chicken leg quarters (cheaper than whole chickens for me), 10 or more lb pork loins to divide into meal-size chunks, bone-in half hams, bulk ground beef, ground beef patties from a wholesaler, and frozen cod pieces. We get a variety of animal protein for minimal cost. But there is often some work involved, such as cutting up a whole pork loin, or roasting whole turkeys, or breaking up a 10-lb package of chicken leg quarters. It's well-worth the work. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts sell for about $1.79 to $1.99/lb, on sale. By buying the leg quarters, I spend 49 cents/lb. There is the waste of bones and skin to take into account. I estimate those parts to be about half of the total weight of the chicken. So, even if I double my 49 cents/lb to 98 cents/lb as cost of actual meat, I'm still coming out way ahead on price per pound for meat only. Plus, I use the bones and skin to make stock, and I save any fat from the meat to use in cooking. I do the same with bone-in hams. I use the bones to make stock, and render and save the ham fat to use in cooking. I make use of every bit that I purchase.

Our meals are humble -- no fancy ingredients. Suppers are often as simple as beans and rice or homemade soups plus bread and salad, and a homemade dessert. But everything is always fresh-tasting and delicious. I make my own short-cuts, such as pie pastry, made in bulk, that I keep in the freezer. And I've memorized many basic recipes, such as biscuit dough, so I can make dumplings without having to look up a recipe. Or alter that same biscuit recipe to pop a batch of scones into the oven. Or make drop biscuits minutes before dinner is on the table.

To make scratch-baking as easy as possible, I do a few things. I keep all of my baking ingredients very handy to the kitchen work area (the pantry is right next to the prep area). And I keep the most often used measures in the ingredient containers, themselves. For instance, I have a 1 cup measure in each of the flour containers, as I use flour most often in increments of cups. And I keep a 1/2 teaspoon measure in the salt jar, so I can easily measure 1/2 teaspoon or "eyeball" measure 1/4 teaspoon. I keep a 1/4 cup scoop in the sugar, as I most often use sugar in increments of quarter cups - 1 scoop - 1/4 cup, 2 scoops - 1/2 cup, etc. It's faster and easier, for me, than getting out and washing the measuring scoops and spoons for each recipe. I also keep a set of cups and spoons at my prep center. And I have separated all of the measuring spoons, so I can grab the one I need, but still have the rest to use later in the day. I wash them in the dishwasher, usually at the end of the day. Dollar Tree is a great place to buy cheap measuring spoons and cups, so I have several sets of each.

I guess you could say that I'm one of those throw-everything-together-as-quickly-as-possible sort of cooks/bakers. I don't worry about perfection in daily meals, and everyone seems happy-enough with my humble meals.